ABSTRACT The annual CUNY sentence processing conference will take place at the University of Rochester this year. This conference assembles 100-200 researchers active in the study of language processing, including linguists, computational linguists, psychologists and philosophers. The conference typically has had invited papers and a fairly open poster session, primarily for graduate students. This year, the organizers are emphasizing increased participation, including a special university-sponsored fund for about 30 graduate student fellowships, several sessions open to competitive submissions and invited posters from senior investigators. There will be three didactic symposia, each devoted to presenting a current area of research which should have a large impact on future sentence processing research. (1) A second wave of connectionist modelling offers new ways of thinking about how to model processes; (2) recent research has coalesced around three different kinds of methods for studying on-line sentence processing, word reading time, on-line probe responses and evoked response potentials on the skull; (3) fresh ideas about lexical concepts and how they are accessed at different levels may lead to models which better integrate the processing of conceptual and structural information. In each case, the symposium will have a main presenter whose charge is to lay out the issues, theories and current results in a way which sentence processing specialists can understand. Commentators have been chosen to explore specific directions and to make specific proposals about the implications for processing research.
